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Leave “Oedipus” and “Frankenstein” for College?

There is a new interactive tool that compares college curriculum across over 1 million syllabi. This syllabus comparison ranks the works that are assigned in courses. The data can be filtered by text, by college, by discipline, by state, and by county. This leads to some interesting comparisons….and soul-searching.

In the United States, the top ten texts assigned at colleges that submitted syllabi are:

Rank

Count

Score

Text

1

3,077

100.0

The Elements of Style

Strunk, William, 1869-1946

2

2,479

99.9

Republic

Plato

3

2,337

99.6

Biology

Campbell, Neil A., 1946

4

2,244

99.7

The Communist Manifesto

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883

5

1,862

99.4

Ethics

Aristotle

6

1,844

99.1

The Prince

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527

7

1,797

99.2

Leviathan

Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679

8

1,787

99.0

Oedipus

Sophocles

9

1,785

99.5

Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

10

1,729

98.5

A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

Turabian, Kate L.

The list is familiar to me. I assigned three of these choices: Elements of Style, Oedipus, and Frankenstein to students over the course of classroom teaching in grades 10th and 12th. I also wonder why anyone would bother to assign Turabian?

It is never too early, or too often, to require Strunk and White’s writing manual Elements of Style.

On the other hand, as much as I loved teaching Oedipus and Frankenstein, I wonder if I should have left them to college?